278308 - Need way to jump to first visible link with keyboard

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[Kevin Dente]

It would be really nice if there was a way to use the keyboard to navigate to
the first _visible_ link (or whatever tab element is visible - text box, image,
etc). Currently when you hit "tab" to navigate the open document with the
keyboard, it jumps to the first tab element on the page, and if you've scrolled
down then the page is scrolled back to the beginning. Ordinarily if you're
tabbing onto the page you want to select the link that you're looking at, not
one that's scrolled off the top of the screen. This is also an accessibility
issue for users who can't use the mouse for navigation.

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

The quickest way to navigate to a link you're looking at is to use find as you
type. Type apostrophe followed by some text in the link.

I could see a hidden pref changing the tab key behavior, but that would only
help the rare individual who hears about it. We'll keep the enhancement request
around, in case anyone comes up with a design worth pursuing. It's not something
people will want to expose a pref in the UI for.

Comment 2

[Kevin Dente]

I played around with your suggestion (on this comment page, in fact), but since
Find As You Type starts from the beginning of the page and scrolls the page as
it matches things, it doesn't quite achieve the right effect. Also, if the link
text is fairly generic (something like 'here' - pretty common), then there may
be lots of matches.

 I would be happy with a keyboard shortcut - it doesn't have to be the tab key,
per se. I looked into writing an extension to accomplish this, but couldn't find
a way to determine the first visible link in the scroll region.

Comment 3

[Rob Avina]

> I looked into writing an extension to accomplish this, but couldn't find
> a way to determine the first visible link in the scroll region.

I don't know what source find as you type uses, but in my mind at least, i could
see something as simple as indexing each tab for text, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and or
otherwise removing the page breaks in between tabs.  The real tough part would
be makeing FAYT jump to the correct tab once it did find the right word.

Comment 4

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Mass un-assigning bugs assigned to Aaron.